Bernardine Evaristo won the Booker prize with a novel full of proud black female characters, but reveals today that she struggled with her racial identity as a child.
Evaristo, 61, the daughter of a white English teacher and a Nigerian welder, said she once crossed the road to avoid being seen with her father because he was “a very dark-skinned black man”.
“I remember when I was about 11, seeing him walking down the street towards me and I crossed the road because I didn’t want to say hello to him because I didn’t want to be associated with him,” she says on today’s Desert Island Discs on Radio 4. “I mean, that feels terrible now, but that’s what it was like, because growing up
